breast.  Fulk had placed his foot on the neck of his vanquished son.  The jealous Eleanora, with the passion and vindictiveness of her Southern blood, encouraged her sons’ disobedience, and trained them to parricide.  These youths, in whose veins mingled the blood of so many different races,—­Norman, Saxon, and Aquitanian,—­seemed to entertain, over and above the violence of the Fulks of Anjou and the Williams of England, all the opposing hatreds and discords of those races.  They never knew whether they were from the South or the North:  they only knew that they hated one another, and their father worse than all.  They could not trace back their ancestry, without finding, at each descent, or rape, or incest, or parricide.”  Henry II. quarrelled with all his sons, and they all did him all the mischief they could, under the advice and direction of their excellent mother, whom Henry imprisoned.  A priest once sought to effect a reconciliation between Henry and his son Geoffrey.  He went to the Prince with a crucifix in his hand, and entreated him not to imitate Absalom.

“What!” exclaimed the Prince, “would you have me renounce my birthright?”

“God forbid!” answered the holy man; “I wish you to do nothing to your own injury.”

“You do not understand my words,” said Geoffrey; “it is our family fate not to love one another.  ’T is our inheritance; and not one of us will ever forego it.”

That must have been a pleasant family to marry into!  When the King’s eldest son, Henry, died, regretting his sins against his father, that father durst not visit him, fearing treachery; and the immediate occasion of the King’s death was the discovery of the hostility of his son John, who, being the worst of his children, was, of course, the best-beloved of them all.  The story was, that, when Richard entered the Abbey of Fontevraud, in which his father’s body lay, the corpse bled profusely, which was held to indicate that the new king was his father’s murderer.  Richard was very penitent, as his elder brother Henry had been, on his death-bed.  They were very sorrowful, were those Plantagenet princes, when they had been guilty of atrocious acts, and when it was too late for their repentance to have any practical effect.

Richard I. had no children, and so he could not get up a perfect family-quarrel, though he and his brother John were enemies.  He died at forty-two, and but a few years after his marriage with Berengaria of Navarre, an English queen who never was in England.  When on his death-bed, Richard was advised by the Bishop of Rouen to repent, and to separate himself from his children.  “I have no children,” the King answered.  But the good priest told him that he had children, and that they were avarice, luxury, and pride.  “True,” said Richard, who was a humorist,—­“and I leave my avarice to the Cistercians, my luxury to the Gray Friars, and my pride to the Templars.”  History has fewer sharper sayings than this, every word of which told like a cloth-yard shaft sent against a naked bosom.  Richard certainly never quarrelled with the children whom he thus left to his friends.